Gov. Jared Polis is set to veto a pro-union bill that Democratic lawmakers have urged him to sign, a move that will strain his increasingly contentious relationship with organized labor in Colorado and set the stage for a 2026 ballot fight.
Polis told reporters Thursday, a day after lawmakers adjourned for the year, that he will soon make good on his session-long threat to reject Senate Bill 5, since it is reaching his desk without amendments he’d urged. The proposal, which would make it easier for organized workers to negotiate union dues with their employers, passed the House with total Democratic support Tuesday after negotiations between Polis, labor unions and business leaders collapsed.
The governor has said he wouldn’t sign SB-5 unless business groups were comfortable with its provisions. But those groups rejected Polis’ final compromise offer.
After that, labor leaders were unwilling to accept new terms Polis sought to introduce — namely, that organized labor and Democratic lawmakers consider cutting restaurant workers’ tipped minimum wages in some places or discuss expanding charter schools.
Since SB-5 passed without a deal, Polis indicated that a veto should come as no surprise.
“I don’t know how you can interpret that any other way,” he said during an end-of-session press conference. “We were seeking a way to get a policy that would have the buy-in to be stable. And unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the sponsors and our best efforts and (those of) many in both the labor and business community, we did not quite get there.”
Though union leaders had privately braced for a veto, a top labor official criticized Polis’ Thursday comments and called them a betrayal of the governor’s prior commitment to support organizing and collective bargaining.
Dennis Dougherty, the executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, quoted Polis’ 2018 gubernatorial questionnaire. Then-candidate Polis, a congressman, promised the group that labor “will have no bigger champion for the rights of workers to organize than myself.”
“He is doing the exact opposite, if he chooses to veto this bill,” Dougherty said, “and he is actively standing on the sides of corporate lobbyists and oligarchs and the elites.”
Colorado’s labor-organizing law is unique among states. After workers vote to organize, they must pass a second vote — with a 75% threshold — before they can negotiate with management over contract provisions dealing with dues and fees. SB-5 would eliminate that step entirely. Business groups fought to keep the second vote.
Before the measure’s final passage this week, several Democratic lawmakers urged the governor to sign SB-5 in their remarks.
Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat who sponsored the bill, said she expected Polis, as “the figurehead of the Democratic Party,” to support a bill that Democrats backed and had worked “incessantly to get done.”
A veto will further strain Polis’ already-tense relationship with the state’s unions. It began to buckle after he vetoed union-backed priority legislation a year ago. SB-5 was supported by national labor leaders including Fred Redmond, the secretary-treasurer of the national AFL-CIO, who met with Polis during the session. Five former U.S. Labor secretaries also urged him to sign the bill.
Polis has said that Colorado’s 81-year-old labor law has worked well and that he wants maximum employee input in negotiating union dues. He added Thursday that he wanted a deal that would bring stability to business-labor relations in the state, referring to fears that a change to the status quo would usher in a tug-of-war over competing ballot measures and legislation.
Asked about Polis’ skeptical views of SB-5, Dougherty said those were concerns “that were not relayed to us when he was running for governor.”
Indeed, Polis’ impending veto risks doing more to disrupt the state’s labor-business status quo than to preserve it. The SB-5 negotiations had included discussions of an armistice on labor-related ballot initiatives, Dougherty said.
Unions have proposed a 2026 ballot measure that would require employers to have “just cause” before they fire workers. They announced a rally by workers and labor leaders Tuesday at Governors Park in Denver to launch the signature-gathering campaign — and to call on Polis, again, to sign SB-5.
At the same time, a libertarian activist is advancing an anti-union “right-to-work” ballot proposal in response to the SB-5 push.
Both potential measures would have gone away had SB-5 negotiations been successful, according to their backers’ past comments.
Now, Dougherty said this week, “we are exploring multiple ballot initiatives.”
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